Two Radio Shows: I Discuss Guantánamo and Julian Assange on TNT Radio and Parallax Views

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This week I was delighted to take part in two interviews, to discuss the prison at Guantánamo Bay, as the 21st anniversary of its opening approaches, and the ongoing plight of Julian Assange, still held in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London, as he continues to challenge his proposed extradition to the US to face espionage charges relating to WikiLeaks’ publication of classified US documents leaked by Chelsea Manning.

On Monday, I spoke with Jason Olbourne on TNT Radio, based in Australia, in an interview that started 21 minutes into the 55-minute show. The interview is available here, and after a great introduction, in which Jason enthused about my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, and the music of The Four Fathers (asking if people have suggested that I sound like David Byrne), we spoke about Guantánamo, with Jason asking me to run through the story of how I first got involved with Guantánamo, in 2006, and how I worked out who was held there, and how very few of them had any meaningful involvement with Al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups.

Jason suggested that people might be held at Guantánamo in future, but was, I hope, persuaded by my explanation that Guantánamo is such a disaster area, legally, that no one with any sense would consider sending anyone there in future. I explained how the majority of the men held there were insignificant, but were tortured or otherwise abused in an effort to extract information from them, because of mistaken presumptions that they were hiding actionable intelligence — presumptions that wouldn’t have been so easy to make if the US authorities had not done away with any kind of screening process when they were first seized, and which led to Guantánamo becoming a place where the authorities’ actions resembled the witch hunts of centuries past.

I added that a handful of men are accused of serious crimes — including the 9/11 attacks — but that their cases are tainted by the torture to which these men were subjected in the CIA “black sites” in which they were held before their transfer to Guantánamo, proving, inadvertently, that federal courts, with their proven track record of prosecuting terrorism-related crimes, are the only viable venue for credible prosecutions.

There was more discussion about Guantánamo and torture, which I hope you’ll listen to, before we moved on to the case of Julian Assange, following the publication of an open letter to the Biden administration by the five newspapers who worked with WikiLeaks on the release of over 250,000 US diplomatic cables in November 2010, which I wrote about here.

As ever, I explained how unjustifiable it is that Assange has been singled out for punishment, and not any of the media organizations who worked with WikiLeaks — or, indeed, myself, as a media partner on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo in 2011 — and I also called on the Biden administration to drop the proposed prosecution as an unacceptable attack on the freedom of the press, as was recognized under President Obama, when Biden, of course, was vice president.

At the end of the show, we spoke briefly about Brexit, which provided me with an opportunity to explain what a disaster it has been, both in terms of trade with our largest trading partner (the EU), and in terms of immigration, preventing the UK from securing much-needed workers in many crucial sectors, as well as reinforcing racism and xenophobia to a truly alarming degree. I also explained how what is at least as alarming is how opportunistic, anti-democratic forces on the far right of the political spectrum are trying to use Brexit to destroy all the rights — of workers, for example, and of environmental protections — that were incorporated into EU law after the UK joined the EU in 1973.

It was a pleasure to talk to Jason, and I hope that we’ll talk again in the not too distant future.

The ‘Parallax Views’ interview

I also spoke, in greater detail, with J. G. Michael for his podcast ‘Parallax Views’, in a show available here that also included an interview with Jordanian filmmaker Darin J. Sallam, whose debut feature, ‘Farha’, just released on Netflix, is the coming-of-age story of a 14-year old Palestinian girl during the Nakba, the violent displacement of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948.

About 38 minutes into the 90-minute show, J. G. and I discussed ‘The Sordid Story of Guantánamo’, prompted, in particular, by former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi’s claims, made in an interview with Mike Prysner for his ‘Eyes Left/Empire Files’ podcast, that Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis was present at Guantánamo when prisoners were being force-fed, and that he revelled in their suffering.

First, though, J. G. generously provided enough time to run through Guantánamo’s history — from the reasons it was chosen by the Bush administration, to be beyond the law, to the torture and abuse that took place under Bush, the failures of President Obama to close the prison, the lost Trump years, and the qualified hopes that President Biden might close it — or, at least, release the men still held who have not been charged with any crimes, and have, instead, been held for up to 20 years without charge or trial.

Under Biden, to his credit, the majority of the “forever prisoners” held when he took office have subsequently been approved for release, so that 21 of the 35 men still held have now been approved for release, although the problem is that they have not yet been freed, and, although Biden recently appointed a State Department official to deal with Guantánamo, getting these men freed may require leadership from the very top of the administration, which to date, has been sadly lacking.

On Mansoor’s allegations, I discussed with J. G. how I didn’t doubt his story, but was unable to make sense of the timeline involved, because DeSantis was supposed to have arrived at Guantánamo in March 2006, while the hunger strike, which had consumed the prison from the summer of 2005 onwards, had reportedly been broken — by early February 2006 — when there were just four long-term hunger strikers left.

I later communicated with Mansoor, and was happy to add, in a later recording, that it may be that DeSantis was present before the date he declared, and/or that the hunger strike went on for longer than the authorities admitted — involving at least 20 men, as Mansoor has suggested — and that, as a result, there is still much more to the DeSantis story to be revealed.

As with Jason Olbourne, it was also a pleasure to talk to J. G., and I hope that we’ll also talk again in the not too distant future.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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